Bill Gates the comic man

Published
Friday, September 12, 2008 8:31 PM

I thought Bill Gates was out saving the world, now that he has officially taken the full-time job as the chairman of Melinda and Gates Foundation and that he is now in full swing promoting creative capitalism, something about advancing common social good while also making profits.

Turned out, Bill Gates can never quit from Microsoft. Now he is starring side by side with Jerry Seinfield prompting, what else? Microsoft windows. The ads are so subtle, so nothing, actually it is not clear what the two men were trying to do other than for being wierdly funny.

In the first ads, Gates twisted his shoes and wriggled his butt; in the second, Gates made dead-pan complaints about food and played powered-out robots. I think he is quite good as an actor, mild-mannered, taciturn.

Many people are puzzled or even angered by the lack of point of the ads. On the other hand, many people raved and are still raving about the Mac Vs. Microsoft ad, where a young lad (good looking, lean, supposedly cool. To me he looked like a Chinese young man in the fifties) called Mac coolly sizes up a happy, clumsy, untidy middle-aged man called PC. The ad ends with a line "Switch to Mac" (or something like that.)

I personally do not find the ads that good. Cannot find any reason that Mac has such a sense of superiority. I cannot stand a Mac computer, with which even word processing becomes a challenge.